Tara LaChance
May 1, 2015
Memory Essay #1
My father’s parents both died before I was born. My mother’s parents didn’t have much interest in spending time with or developing a relationship with their grandchildren. They said they had raised their children and were done. I have always had a very intense longing to have grandparents who would tell me stories about where they came from and my heritage, to take me places and spend time with me like I saw so many of my friends’ grandparents doing with them. For this reason, I decided that I would seek out a person who I could ask the questions that I would have asked my own grandparents. I really wanted to find someone who emigrated from Italy, since that was where my father’s grandmother came from, and I feel more connected to that side of my family (even though I never met them) than to my mother’s side. But, as fate would have it, I came across a woman who emigrated from Germany, which, by coincidence, is where my mother’s grandmother came from. So, this is her story.
I didn’t seek her out. Instead, she just happened to be sitting at the front desk of a recreation center for senior citizens that a friend took me to one day. I went in with the intention of just asking if they had anyone there who had emigrated from Europe and would be willing to speak to me about it. As I was asking the receptionist at the front desk if she knew anyone who may fit these criteria, there was a woman sitting with her back to me, maybe a foot away and had been talking to the receptionist when I walked in. The receptionist said, “Well, she is from Germany and has a lot of great stories” and points to the woman sitting in front of me. The woman slowly turned around and I said, “Great! Would you be willing to speak to me?”. “You’ve come right at lunch time”, she answered, “but I can talk to you for a few minutes. Let’s go in the back room where it’s quiet.”
I introduced myself and she did the same. Her name is Hermina, and she was born in Berchthegargen, Germany in 1929. She is about 5’2” with a round figure with an accent but very adept at the English language. She has short, white hair that comes above her shoulders with loose, sporadic curls and is pinned up on both sides with gold barrettes. She wears a gold necklace with a cross, gold hoop earrings and small, frameless glasses also with gold accents. Her eyes are blue and you can tell that, in her youth, she was a beautiful woman.
Her parents were Austrian, she makes sure to tell me, but she was raised in Germany. She is kind and open, willing to tell me whatever I want to know. It seems as though she is happy that I am interested in hearing about her life, although her demeanor is not overly friendly, I still feel an instant connection with her. Maybe partly because the great-grandmother on my father’s side that I mentioned I had wanted to interview…her name was Erminia. What a great coincidence!
Her mother died when she was 10 years old of ovarian cancer, and Hermina was put in to a foster home. Her two brothers and one sister were put in foster homes a well. She goes on to explain that her father died a couple of years later but she is unsure of how. In the middle of this, she interjects, “And then the war happened”. “Do you remember much about the war?” I ask her. “I remember everything” she replied. “Would you mind telling me about it?” She begins right away: “We of course had the bombings. I slept in my clothes for three years straight because you never knew when the bombs would start and you would have to go to the bomb shelters. We had the black-out windows, all the windows blacked out. And then it got to the point where we got bombed every hour, on the hour, at the end of the war, you know. Sometimes we run for the bunker and if it was too late and they closed the bunkers up, then here we are out and the bombs are coming down. Then we hit the ground and as soon as we got, we made a circle and we dashed to the next building which was a school house, down in the basement there during the bombing. Bombing was hell.”
She lived in Munich, on the opposite side of the mountain where Adolf Hitler lived, she tells me matter-of-factly. “Were you afraid of Hitler?” I asked, very quickly she says no. In the same breath, she goes on to say, “You have to belong to his party or you didn’t have a job. People wanted to work. My father and mother, they had four kids, they needed work you know. But uh, I don’t know of anyone that got by Not belonging to his group. He held a Christmas party for all of the families with four or more children every year and we all sat at long tables and we each got a gift.” She looked forward to attending that every year, being young and not knowing any better, she explained.
She saw Hitler in person once as he went through the town in a parade. “We were all on rations, and the rations were very small.” She doesn’t show any emotional effect when I ask about Hitler which I find interesting. Also during my questions about Hitler she told me that her blood brothers who were also sent to foster families, both had to go in to the German army during the war. I asked if they were forced to go in and her response was, “Well, they were 16 and no parents, what are they gonna do? You join the army.” She continues by saying, “One joined the SS because it paid more but not the kind of SS that was in a concentration camp, he was in with a fighting troop. He lost a lot out of his back and he lost a leg. The other brother joined in the fighting because that’s all he wanted to do.” I asked if she ever spoke to her brothers about their experiences in the war but she ignored the question and moved on to talk about her brothers and their families, so I left it alone. She is the only one left out of her family now.
Outside of Munich was a concentration camp, she tells me, called Dachau. “Did you know what was happening to people there?” I asked her. “No, no, no, we didn’t know what happened inside of that until after the war. What the American’s said” she tells me. “But uh, I was supposed to have had an uncle in there but I never did find out who he was or what his name was, I never saw him after the war so evidently he was one of them that…” she stopped there, right in the middle of that thought. After the war, she goes on to tell me, they went in and saw the “burners” inside of the Dachau where they burned the people. Also a tree that supposedly was used to hang 800 people a day. She says it just didn’t make sense to her because there was not a scratch on that tree. I had never heard of this camp so I Googled it when I returned home that day and found this information.[i] “Dachau Concentration Camp was the first of its kind opened in Germany by the Nazi government in 1933, and it served as a model for later concentration camps. Designed to hold Jews, political prisoners, and other “undesirables,” the camp is now a memorial to the more than 40,000 people who died and over 200,000 who were imprisoned here during the Nazi regime. The memorial was established in 1965, 20 years after Dachau was liberated by American forces.”
She recalls how the school children in her town were given the rations to deliver to families in the area every week. They gave them the addresses and a package of what goes to each family. She spoke about how sugar was “almost impossible” during those times. She wanted to bake a cake, so she saved up the sugar rations for three months in order to have enough. While she was waiting for the cake to bake, bombs were falling, everything was rattling, but she wanted that cake so badly, she just stood at the oven and waited for it. Her foster parents owned a restaurant so she said that she didn’t feel hungry during the war. They had access to a garden and they were also able to go to other towns to get meat from butchers. Her foster mother was very strict, she and the three other children had to sit down right away when coming home from school to do their homework before they could play or do anything else. She describes her foster father as “really a nice guy.” She gets the first smile on her face so far and remembers, “We used to get in to trouble together.” She describes her childhood as “beautiful”.
One time, a plane was shot down in Munich where Hermina lived, she was only maybe 11 years old, her and several other children wanted to “see what he looked like”. She thought that the pilot was an American. They began to run towards the plane and they began getting bombed. One of the other kids, a boy, yelled at her to run for her life, in a zig-zag pattern. She didn’t end up seeing the pilot’s face but when I asked if the plane was, in fact, American, she told me it was actually British.
I find it so fascinating that she was a part of that time in our history and wonder how it must feel to be able to look back and say that you lived through all of these things that so many people want to know about now. Over the course of three interviews with her, she says several times, “You know, I’ve had good times and bad times”.